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How should 301 redirects affect Page Authority?

We recently setting up 301 redirects from one of our sites so that the site redirects from the www version to the non-www version for all pages. We want to quantify what we expect to see as results. From what the experts say, we'd expect that the Page Authority of the canonical versio (non-www) will be higher than either of the two separate ones were previously. For instance, if this page - www.website.com/information/ - had a PA of 57 and this one - website.com/information/ - had a PA of 53, some time after the 301 redirects from www to non-www have been put into place, we should see the non-www version of that page move up to some PA about 57. It our thinking correct? How long does it normally take to see a PA update take place in a scenario like this?

1 Response

Richard - most likely, you're correct. PA, however, is an amalgamation of a lot of metrics combined via machine learning against Google's SERPs to produce the highest correlated metric with rankings. Thus, it could well be the case that this move doesn't boost PA (and PA itself recalculates/calibrates with each index).

However, I wouldn't be too worried about PA - I would be worried about potential rankings and traffic, and it sounds like your solution should help with that (if you're combining like/duplicate content).

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